Edible Traditions
Syruping Tradition Gets Sweeter With Time at Orchard School By Shawndra Miller Photos courtesy of The Orchard School
Fred Lorenz captures the attention of young students while making pancakes, circa 1960’s.
It takes three ingredients to create maple syrup: sap, fire and time. So says Vicky Prusinski, Orchard School’s elementary science teacher. A final critical ingredient, knowledge, undergirds the other three. Ask any student or alum of Orchard, where the first-graders are at the helm of a tradition almost as old as the school. Nearly every year for eight decades now, Orchard students have tapped maple trees and boiled the sap down to syrup. As early as 1927, the school began tapping trees and boiling sap at its original location. The Indianapolis Star that spring boasted, “500 quarts taken from a maple sugar camp right in the City of Indianapolis!”
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Today, the tradition continues in the two-acre maple grove flanking Orchard, a private school that serves preschool through eighthgrade students. Each year, roughly in late February, the first-graders follow the exact syruping process taken by earlier generations of Orchard students. Meanwhile, teachers and faculty keep the custom alive. The late Fred Lorenz, an avid outdoorsman, came on board as the shop teacher in 1948. His daughter, Linda Lorenz Norton, says he loved to introduce children to the great outdoors, even opening Brown County’s Gnaw Bone Camp to continue his passion during summers. She was a first
Spring 2012
